The sea conditions today were perfect. The water surface remained like a mirror throughout the day with almost zero wind and clear sunny skies.
In total today we saw 4 different species of Cetacean: Short-beaked common dolphin, Humpback Whale, Minke Whale and Harbour Porpoise. Not a bad hall. Our rarely seen dolphin species was once again spotted just in front of Akureyri harbour in the morning and interestingly not seen again in the afternoon; this is in line with our sightings of this dolphin from previous days. Its presence is still a little bit of a mystery to us, but, it certainly seems to be no chance event as this location is where we encountered a pair of the same species just last year; the first recorded sighting of this species in the North of Iceland and one of only few encounters for the whole country.
We then saw a Humpback Whale further North in between Svalbarðseyri and the Green buoy. This Whale, Magnea, was exhibiting short 3-minute dives and spending minimal time at the surface. A little further towards the buoy a Minke Whale was also encountered, however, proved challenging to regularly locate because of the great distances it was travelling between breaths.
On our afternoon tour we were only able to find the Humpback Whale, in the same place, however, now the whale was sleeping in the form of logging. These encounters with this sleeping whale will probably go down as some of my favourite encounters with Humpbacks. Being the only boat in the water and the perfect sea conditions allowed us to stay motionless with the engine off crucially putting minimal disturbance on the whale during some of its most vital behaviours. These encounters really were amazing and being able to do it in ethical fashion such as this leaves me with little words to describe the moment.
And, if that wasn’t enough, our first sightings of Arctic Turns and Skua truly do signal the commencing of summer here in Iceland.
To add to the list of marine Mammals a further species was spotted in the form of a Harbour (or maybe grey but who can tell these things at a glance) Seal. This guy was hanging around Akureyri and was seen on both tours.
text & Photos: Mac
Departures: Classic - 0900 O´Clock. Express: 1000 & 1400 O’Clock